The present invention pertains to forest products and particularly to the use of wood fibers.
Trees in the USA are of two general types for commercial purposes, hardwoods and softwoods. The softwoods are well utilized for the manufacture of newsprint, paper and the like paper products. Hardwoods, in the larger trees, are well utilized for the production of lumber.
However, the hardwood category also includes large numbers of relatively small trees, trees that are deformed or are otherwise not well shaped to produce commercial sizes and quantities of lumber, and the relatively larger as well as the smaller limbs of the larger hardwood trees which are not utilizable for lumber. The present invention is directed towards utilization of this resource.
That is, softwood production is well spoken for and most of the hardwood production is spoken for. It is the part of the hardwood production which is not otherwise usable at present which is usable in accordance with the invention to produce structural material such as panels with texturized surfaces and other objects of a particular category.
The prior art has been aware of certain problems in the use of hardwood fiber in methods such as the present invention that involve pressing of the fibers into products. Hardwoods tend to have short and thick walled fibers. These short thick walled fibers, when used in conventional processes of the same general category as the present invention and in paper making, tend to bend to each other only poorly, and, especially important as to paper, tend to exhibit poor tear strength and an abudance of natural and generated fine material that causes drainage problems resulting in low wet web strength. In the present state of the art, hardwood pulps are used primarily only as a filler and as a means to provide smoother surfaces on paper for printing.
Because of these problems, utilization of hardwoods of lower than lumber quality as set forth above has not occurred. This results in a good deal of waste of these lower quality hardwoods resulting in added pressure on softwood production.